I was trying to relax. Sipping coffee, living the high life and relaxing way up on one of the branches of the World Tree just looking over the amazing view. It was glorious, honestly, being this high up in a tree not even two months old that in the old world would have taken over a hundred years to grow to this size. Nasty old thick orange Virginia clay is apparently good for a young growing cosmic sapling. The bark was almost soft in the crook where the wide branch met the trunk and formed the perfect curve for me to recline.
If it were any bigger, I could build an old school colonial house on this branch alone. I still had my armor on for three reasons. One, I had gotten used to it and it was comfortable now; Two, this world is spontaneously dangerous; Three, that little burning ache in the back of my head telling me to watch out. The main problem was that little ache, that pinprick pressure that screamed like a faraway mouse, was yelling “DANGER!” over and over.
What made this sensation worse was the definitive fact that I was safe. Roughly speaking, I was actually safe, no danger in sight or anything that should activate the tiny bit of my intellect dominated by my lizard brain. But here I sat, freaking out. Gungnir was inside doing its thing, Reeanth was out doing who knows what, and I had nothing to do. Oh, I had things I wanted to do, but something wasn’t right and I couldn’t concentrate.
Draining my cup, I set it in front of me, the stone mug settling nicely on the flat coarse bark. Reaching out with my magical senses, I pulsed them out as far as they could go, trying to catch a glimpse, a niggling, a blip of something - anything that might be the cause of my instincts going haywire.
Peace.
Utter peace.
No wind was blowing. No leaves were falling. No animal cries or natural sounds were uttered. Stillness. And it was driving me CRAZY.
I jumped to my feet and banished the stone mug. Using my Nature Sorcery, I made the bark of the tree grow convenient knobs to serve as hand and footholds while I clambered down. Racing inside the under-tree hideout, I went down the stairs and sprinted to the cavern for Gungnir.
“Get off that. Get over here.” I said to my weapon, holding my hand out.
[God you’re tense.] Gungnir sent over our mental link while changing into spear form and slapping into my hand.
[Fuck me man, I know. This is the calm before the storm, but I can’t tell where the storm’s coming from. I feel like there’s a giant invisible bear in the room but I’m the only one that knows. Is this what crazy people feel like? Ya know, like those apocalypse preachers on street corners?]
[I mean, other than the upcoming Ripple, the last one, ain’t no storm around here.]
[That’s in a couple days, right? We got time. Besides, it’s the last wave, and they’ve gotten weaker over time, so this last one should be cake, easy street.]
Gungnir paused for a moment before answering. [Nope. It’s tomorrow.]
My grip on Gungnir tightened, my body’s ingrained fear of the Ripple asserting itself. [The HELL do you mean tomorrow?] My mind screamed. The mental scars of almost dying under the reality-bending wave hadn’t left me like my physical injuries had. A pulse of pure mana, originating from Gungnir, traveled up my arm and stimulated my Flesh Sorcery, temporarily calming me and restoring a semblance of a clear mind. I have to remember to do that more often, the ability to make myself think clearly is a benefit I definitely needed to use more often.
[Thanks.]
[No problem. I don’t have a body to regulate, for which I greatly thank you for. And the Ripples aren’t an exact science. If our Olympus based visitors are to be believed, then it’s the shockwave of a dead god who’s so old that we can’t even know its name. It doesn’t function on our timetable. It’s almost like we’re feeling the effects of two black holes colliding. Besides, you’re right. Something isn’t right. The mana levels are dense, absurdly so.]
I looked around my under-river bolthole. [I mean, we’re in the cavern. I have a humongous generator ten feet away, duh.]
[No no, the mana from outside, it’s clinging to you. Like you just walked in from the rain. You don’t even notice because you’re always full of power, a battery that’s never full, but any other wizard right now is probably high off their rocker. It’s probably due to the Ripple coming early, or it’s related to it somehow]
Aw shit. Already? Fucking Reeanth. I just made the damn tracking ball and I already have to fucking use it.
Some time later . . .
Brainworms. I finally remembered what it was called. That stupid song that gets stuck in your head for days on end, like when ‘Golddigger’ was my best friend seven months in at college and nothing would get it out. Still remember whistling the ‘she gives me money!’ part as I walked down the main avenue just rocking out in my own head.
Right now, my current brain worm was a sing-songy old favorite of my hippy fiancée when she would get home from work and complain about her horrible boss, “Fuck you, fuck you very very muuuuuch!”. I couldn’t even stop myself from singing it under my breath as I followed the stupid tracking orb I had made to find Reeanth. The worst part was I couldn’t even remember who sings that song. Pain in my ass and all I could think about was tearing that bitch a new one.
Describing what I am feeling is rather hard at this moment, because it’s so much more than just tension. Just imagine being at the zoo checking out the tigers and everything is great, and then you look over and you realize that the door is cracked open, that the door KEEPING THE TIGER AWAY is FREAKING OPEN. But it’s all the doors. And you’re holding twenty pounds of raw steak in your hands.
Now that bodily reaction, that oh shit split second of a freeze, take it and stretch that out. Stretch that tension out until you begin to voluntarily let it inside of you, where it can nest and feast on your peace. This nice little mid-morning nature walk to go find Reeanth before the big bad Ripple comes is turning into some kind of sick mind game that reality is playing with my head. Nothing is out right now, and I am a badass Sorcerer, but I feel that the door to the freakin’ tigers is open and they are going to jump out at any second.
[What if, and hear me out, what if… it’s not weak?]
I know what Gungnir meant. The Ripple, the last one, supposedly the weakest one.
[I’m starting to feel it now too,] Gungnir continued. [The mana feels electrified, like it’s about to pour down rain.] I just let Gungnir prattle on. [I mean, death throes are a thing, why would a deity be any different? What’s to say that this last Ripple won’t be the mother of all Ripples? The freaking tidal wave? The gasping spasm of a god of chaos, wouldn’t that be epically catastrophic? I mean, I’m just spitballin’ here.]
My pace picked up. Screw you Murphy’s Law. If you could take all the possible strings of Fate and organize them from best to worst, I bet there are plenty of times that my name shows up bright and clear in the frayed strands near the bottom. I passed plenty of glowing trees as orb-form Gungnir floated a foot above my right shoulder, keeping perfect pace as the tracker ball rolled on. A thought I hadn’t considered pulled me up short.
What the freaking hell am I doing? Why am I chasing after some giant magical alien female when every remaining instinct I have is screaming “DANGER”? The tracking ball rolled on, and I just watched it as it crested over the hill and vanished from sight.
“Yeah, yeah.” I muttered. “Fuck you, fuck you very very much.” Turning, I looked at the trail behind me, then back to the hill in front of me. “Eh, just one more hill,” I said. “Gungnir. If we get to the top of that hill and we don’t see her, we’re going back.”
A mental confirmation clicked down our link. Reeanth had started to grow on me (mainly because I’m lonely), but I had other priorities - namely, my own ass, so sticking my neck out too far wasn’t in the cards.
Jogging up the steep hill littered with leaves, I reviewed my earlier thoughts. Why the hell was I running after Reeanth? She has an epic suit of magical nano-tech armor that self-repairs and has plenty of weapons, that grown woman can take care of herself. I mean, she looks like she could tear a normal human in half with her bare hands. Out of all my instincts, I for some reason decided to go with the dumbest one: the pack instinct. Humans are herd animals like sheep, and that doesn’t speak well of how we work as groups. One of these days I’m going to have to do a deep dive in my instincts and see what I can do in there.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Reaching the top, I took a breath and looked around. “Waste of fucking time.” I sighed.
“Totally.” Gungnir agreed, adopting a surfer dude accent. “But, that alien butt is righteous. I’d run after it too.”
“Uhm, except I’m two feet too short and one wife too many. Besides, she ain’t right in the head. By the way, just to reiterate for my peace of mind, you don’t go further than two feet away from me. When this Ripple hits, I need you to first protect me, and then second, capture as much of the excess ambient energy as you can, if possible.”
“Already on top of it. Got a few dimensional runes that I pulled out of Rath’s brain a couple days back and I think they are geared towards energy imprisonment and stasis. It’s like the dragon’s internal mechanism to store energy when it isn’t compatible with their body at that time, but the mechanism still allows them to hold on to it if they can manage to overpower or merge with it over time.”
“I cannot wait until I can actually have a conversation that I leave with more answers than questions.”
“Hey, is that her?” Gungnir asked, shooting a small harmless beam of light off into the distance. “Looks like she’s in the middle of a… what do you call those? A crop circle?”
A few minutes of jogging later, Gungnir and I made it to where Reeanth was furiously digging runes in a small clearing with her maul. “What in the world are you doing?” I asked, surveying the strange scene before me. Glancing at me with a crazed look in her eye, she continued to dig. “Reeanth!”
“It’s coming!” She huffed, almost out of breath with her exertions. “It’s almost here, and I’m going to die!” She could only mean one thing. The Ripple.
“Why didn’t you tell? And jeez, so what if it’s coming, how’s it going to kill you? This doesn’t make any sense. It’s the death cry of a dead god right, so wouldn’t it hit the entire universe?” I pressed. “This doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean that all wizards or Centauri are going to die?”
“What, no?” She answered, her face scrunched incredulously as if I just asked a stupid question. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think it was coming this soon. I also thought you were down at the cavern. It’s warded well enough so why would you be in danger?”
I scoffed at her. “Don’t give me that, I literally don’t know shit. A god of chaos died and I became a Sorcerer from it.”
“It’s not the cry itself that will kill me, it’s the mana differential of the environment reacting to the tsunami of power.”
Rubbing my temples, I ground my teeth. “That’s not a fucking answer.”
“I get it!” Gungnir said, “That explains so much.”
“Any time now man.”
“Think about it this way, throw a rock in the ocean and it makes a wave, but that wave doesn’t hurt anything. Because a wave in the ocean doesn’t mean anything, because a wave is water that’s already in the water, it’s just moving. That’s the Ripple in the areas of the universe other than Earth; it added magic to magic that was already there, like throwing a bucket of water into an ocean. Now, the Earth has no magic, or almost none compared to the rest of the Cosmos, so when you add magic to it, it’s like a tsunami hitting the little beach town. Or a comet hitting the ocean causing a tsunami that then floods all of the lowest lands.Waaaay different results.”
Working through this hurt, because how the hell are we supposed to survive a magical tsunami?
“Hey!” Gungnir interrupted my train of thought. “You’re literally thinking of dumb questions. In the beginning, you had no magic, so when the water, or the magic hit, you were the sand that absorbed the wave. Now that you have magic, you’re basically the rock formation getting pounded by the wave. It’ll hurt, but you’ll live. Besides, I’m your shield, which’ll help a lot.”
“Then what is she doing?” I asked, pointing at Reeanth.
“Uhm, got me there. Alien! Alien woman! What are you doing exactly?”
“That’s a rune of containment within a Greater rune of diversion!” She said, pointing at the squarish one within a squiggly in front of her while speaking as fast as possible. “And the two here,” she pointed to the ones to her right and left, “are the directional siphoning circuits to bleed off what the first doesn’t handle. The last . . “ as she pointed behind herself to a crude rune with a glass bottle in the center. It was filled almost halfway with a thick red substance. “That one is intent substitution diversion with a desire-based thought matrix.”
“A what and a huh?”
I’m a smart guy, but I’m having an inadequacy problem at the moment.
“I don’t have time for this!” She screamed hoarsely, hopping out of the crude circle of runes and placing her hand on Gungnir. She closed her eyes for a second, and then hopped back to her work.
“Oh, that’s ambitious,” Gungnir mused. “Insane, but it might actually work.” I could hear the obvious respect in the orb’s tone.
The crystal eye of the orb turned to me and caught me glaring at it. “Oh, right, shit, uhm, didn’t mean to leave you out of that.” It stuttered through like a five-year old that got caught stealing candy. “She just allowed me to download her plan. Ok, so this whole thing is for protection, mainly. The Ripple hits the circle she’s standing in, which acts as a kind of magical shield and diverting canal, and the runes direct the flow to protect her. The tricky one is the one behind her. It’s her blood, which she put a single rune containing a thought or want inside of it, the desire for Sorcery.”
I raised one eyebrow and motioned for Gungnir to continue as I asked a question of my own. “Why didn’t she tell me any of this?”
Gungnir laughed. “Because this is insane! Nobody would normally dumb enough to be out in the open when a Chaos wave hits. Other parts of the galaxy have something similar . . . mana or magic storms. Everyone is supposed to get inside during those things. They mutate landscapes beyond recognition.”
I shrugged. “And this is worse . . or what? And what’s she doing?”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. There’s a lot more to it but that’s for later. For her, the ritual will serve as a distraction, because magic, pure magic, is almost sentient. It kind of just acts if left to its own devices, like wild magic, very dangerous stuff. So, the blood jar will serve to function as bait, so the wave will hit the rune circle, and if it’s not enough, will be diverted to the other runes, protecting Reeanth inside the main circle, and then direct the chaos towards unprotected bait, the blood jar, which may also have a tiny chance of capturing a Sorcery if all goes well.”
“Huh. So, why’s she freaking out?” I asked as her digging picked up the pace.
“Something to do with the lack of proper ritual materials. The image in her head that she sent me was a seriously elaborate ritual complete with focus crystals and storage gems and silver/gold rune inlays with a blooded inlay.” The orb floated a little closer to Reeanth, as if to get a better look.
“Hey!” I shouted, grabbing it with my hands and pulling it back. “No sir. You stay near me. Besides, I might be able to help.” With Gungnir showing me mentally what Reeanth had in her mind, I began to use my Earth Sorcery to smooth out the rough edges of the dirt circle and transmuted the dirt into granite with two-inch channels connecting the Cardinal directions. Walking to the top rune, I slowly conjured a quartz crystal in the shape of the rune and placed it in the dug-up slot, and then did the same for the left and right runes.
“This is pretty easy,” I said jokingly. “What’s all the fuss?” My magic smoothed out the area to become a better-than-rough approximation of what she needed.
Glaring at me, Reeanth snapped. “Sorcery makes everything easy!” Her eyes softened just a bit. “But thank you. This will hopefully make my chances of surviving better. Your hideouts didn’t have the standard protection runes or anything to prevent the Ripple from making tangible contact. That’s why I started making this, for a piece of a chance at survival. You already survived enough Ripples on your own as well.”
“I helped!” Gungnir interjected.
“Gungnir could have easily protected both of us, you idiot.” I said, scoffing lightly. “You didn’t need to do any of this,” I continued as I gestured at the circle. “But, the blood jar that can capture Sorcery? I’ve been trying to do that with crystals and I barely got any results, except for a maybe that I need to test out.”
“Worry about that later! It’s mainly to serve as distraction bait.” She said, waving her hands in my face. “We don’t have much time, at least finish what you started.”
“So ungrateful.” I grumbled as I kept on conjuring crystals, smoothing out the runes and turning the dirt into stone. “Do this, conjure that, fucking princess.” Within ten minutes, the crude dirt drawing had been transformed into an almost respectable ritual. An inner and outer circle were carved into beautiful marbled granite with shiny quartz crystals studding the Cardinal directions, and Reeanth was in the middle, shaking with fear, or anticipation. I couldn’t really tell. The blood jar was sitting on its own platform at the Southern point.
“Does that one need a rune, and where the hell did you get a fucking glass jar?”
“My suit’s nanites and sand,” She answered. “And they also carved all the necessary runes at the molecular level, so this is the most reliable part of the entire ritual.”
“Well shit,” I said quietly to myself as I looked around. “Why the fuck not?” I inspected Reeanth’s setup one more time and then found myself some room about forty feet away.
“My lord, what are you doing?”
“My turn bitches!” I laughed, using my Earth Sorcery to make a much more tidy version than what Reeanth originally had. I conjured a granite platform with disk shaped slots at the cardinal directions, and then put in the same runes in the same places, but this time I filled in the circuit lines with copper, as that was much quicker to conjured than gold due to how common it is.
Then, using Gungnir as a memory bank, I conjured the quartz version of the blood jar, complete with runes, and stuck it in its place. Using Flesh Sorcery, I nicked open a vein on my left arm and bled into the jar and then continued to bleed while directing the flow to cover the copper wire circuitry. With a quick flex of will, I healed myself, replenished the lost blood and stood in the middle of my much better ritual circle.
“My lord, please, we don’t have much time before it arrives,” Reeanth said, with a pleading look on her face. “These channels won’t do anything, they need some kind of metal to act as a circuit. I was going to use my will to serve as the circuit base but the ambient pressure is exponentially higher than I anticipated.”
“Seriously? You didn’t plan this well at all.” I complained, walking back over to her. I conjured copper to fill in the channels and looked her in the eye.
“I was caught out here!” Reeanth snapped. “Didn’t you feel the manasphere suddenly get intense? I was going to use blood as the channel and bait and then hope and pray for survival.”
I let out a breath. “Anything else?” She shook her head no. “Good,” I said, walking back to my own circle.
Sitting down Indian style in the center, I faced my blood jar and stuck my finger on the outside, lightly resting it at the lip of the jar.
[Breathe in, breathe out]. Calming myself was harder than I hoped at that moment, I couldn’t afford to mess this up. I really didn’t know if this would work, but the possibility existed that I could get another Sorcery. What would work best? Man, my current power set is awesome, but limiting in some ways. It lends itself to long-term survival and fortifications as well as healing and defensive power, but that very same combo prevents me from being compatible with other kinds of Sorcery, like fire or death or void.
Besides, Gungnir is every kind of destruction rolled into one convenient piece of arcane artillery.
My elements are earth, water, nature, flesh, and mana/enchantment. Fire is antithetical to my core, and lightning is a purified expression of fire. Energy would be cool, but severely limited with the odd restrictions. The only way I even came to that conclusion was when I tried to ingest Rath and his power, the fire dragon from not too long ago. That encounter made me realize that the harmony of my capabilities is almost more important than the abilities themselves. Sorcery is inherent to the soul, and a powerful soul is required to even have it. I have several sorceries, and if I had opposing kinds, then the disharmony wouldn’t allow me to have more than a set of two. But the fact that everything I have literally works together in the world, the synergy allows for me to possess more than I should.
So what would work with what I have?
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end right as Reeanth let out an oddly pitched screech. “My lord! Prepare yourself!”
Looking over at her without moving my hand, I saw her body start to shake just a little harder than the shiver from five minutes ago. Her head tilted up and I followed her line of sight. A smorgasbord of oil-slicked rainbow colors streaked across the sky, making the sun and the barely visible moon Ripple. The clouds followed suit as reality bore the weight of change on its shoulders. It had arrived.